The Real Pandemic

Posted on August 10, 2021 by thezman

It is very difficult to assess what is happening in a revolutionary moment, because things seem to change so quickly. Looking back, the French Revolution is easier to understand, because we know how it ended. We can look at the events in the context of Napoleon or the Terror. The same is true of the Bolshevik Revolution, that came to a similar end. In fact, putting the two together makes it possible to understand things about both that the people at the time could never know.

This is a useful thing to keep in mind in this age, as the radicals push the revolution forward, for reasons they don’t comprehend. Legacy conservatives will keep trying to jam these events into the obsolete world view, blaming things on the lust for power or a desire to take your money. Others will blame it on nefarious actors like George Soros, because that is the easy thing to do. Blaming a a single bad actor or groups of actors makes things simple for the simple-minded.

In reality, in revolutionary times, men are like people swept up in a great flood, carried along by the forces of nature. They look for things to hang onto in order to escape being swept away, like their own ideological mindset. The revolutionaries are no different in this regard but they convince themselves they are the ones driving the river, when all they have done is unleash the floodgates. They are as much a victim of their own zealous lunacy as the people they oppose.

An example is this story about the city of Charlotte. The city is passing a nondiscrimination ordinance that will protect “gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation and natural hairstyles.” Since all of those things are meaningless word salad, they have, in effect, banned everything and nothing. The term “natural hairstyles” is a cult-Marx term for black women with afros, but otherwise the rest of it just means whatever the mentally ill can conjure next.

The people behind this stuff know that these words and therefore the law is nonsense, but they also know that is the point. They have been trained up in the latest cult-Marx dogma which says they must subvert expectations and undermine the prevailing cultural orthodoxies. They may or may now know what any of that means, but they know enough to know chaos is the order of the day. These terms are all moral signifiers, justifying an all-out assault on cultural norms.

Again, the usual suspects will try to assign specific rational explanations for why they are trying to sow chaos, but that sort of reductionism misses the point. The chaos is the point of all this, as the goal is to smash the cultural orthodoxy. Essential to Nth wave Marxism is the belief that culture is what prevents the natural rise of socialism, so if you destroy the culture, a new socialist order will arise. More important, a new socialist man will rise from the wreckage of white supremacist society.

Like original Marxism, this is nonsense. It is worse than nonsense, in that it is an esoteric religion that flatters the believer by replacing their reality with the promise of special insight. Once you come to believe that wrecking the present order will usher in the great revolution of mankind, you are now in a special club of people who have found the answer to the great question. The irrationality of it is the draw. It appeals to that natural need to believe that is a key trait of man.

What we are living through is a revolution pushed along by people who are sure they are creating conditions for the great liberation. The details of that great liberation and how it will come into existence are just assumed. This was always the appeal of the original Marxism. It provided a childish vison of a glorious future, onto which the believer could project his fantasy vision of the future. Then it supplied a story of history that claimed the glorious future was an historical inevitability.

This the core of Cultural Marxism. Because of the demographic changes in the West, it has been repackaged along racial lines. Instead of destroying bourgeoise culture they are set on destroying white culture. This has obvious appeal to people who came to the West for the free stuff but find that the cost of that free stuff is the abandonment of their old ways. For blacks, of course, it means they get to taste the vengeance that has been promised to them since the last century.

In the lab, this stuff sounds appealing, but when you go around smashing the culture, there is no guarantee what will happen next. The culture tends to restrain the worst passions of the people who produced it. Once those restraints are gone, those passions are released to mix with the passion of the zealots who did the smashing. Imagine an Antifa rally without police protection. All of a sudden, the people who defunded the police discover a truth hidden in their revolutionary furor.

This is why making sense of the revolution is only worthwhile as a way to get a glimpse of what comes next. History shows that the people driving these events are like the coronavirus of the present moment. All efforts to mitigate it result in a mutation that gets around the mitigation. All you can do is prepare for what comes after it has done its worst to the host population. Then maybe you can have a chance to rebuild with an eye on preventing any future outbreaks of this pestilence.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb. Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Irrational Losers

Posted on August 9, 2021 by thezman

Note: The weekly Taki post is up. The topic this week is something I hope to dive into on the podcast this week. The revolution from above will be a new favorite phrase. There is also the Sunday podcast up behind the green door.

One of the distinguishing features of conservatism is the habit of attacking its own side during conflicts with the Left. In fact, these self-criticism sessions are usually triggered by left-wing criticism of the Right or in anticipation of such criticism. Somewhere in the middle of the fight, usually when things are looking up for the good guys, conservatives will attack their own team over some small issue. The claim is that the people in error are undermining the fight against the left with their bad ideas.

A recent example is Heather MacDonald taking to the pages of a center-left platform to criticize vaccine skeptics as knuckle-dragging primitives. You see, there are people opposed to the Left who do not hold the same opinions as Heather MacDonald with regards to the vaccines, so those people must be corrected. Sure, things are going badly for the Left on the Covid issue but removing that fly from a friend’s face with a hatchet is too important to wait until after the fight.

There is no question that many people opposed to the strip-mining of what is left of our liberties over the Covid issue are wrong about a lot of things. Some think the vaccine changes your DNA. Some think the vaccines are entirely fake, part of some plot to control society. If you look hard enough, you can probably find people who think the vaccines are an alien technology developed at Area 51. Covid is a ruse to experiment on the public with this new extraterrestrial technology.

America is a big country, so you can find just about every crazy idea imaginable if you look long enough. Why does Mx. MacDonald think these people are worthy of a public tongue lashing? The stated reason is those vaccine skeptics are acting as irrationally as the people they oppose. Some of them think vaccines in general may not be all that safe and are refusing this vaccine. Imagine that? People in the middle of a heated partisan fight putting aside reason to score points against the enemy?

Presumably, Mx. MacDonald thinks these people are harming the cause in some way, so they must be silenced. The claim appears to be reason. You see, by tolerating the unreasonable on her side, it would harm her claims to being the most reasonable person in the room. Therefore, reason compels her to root around the ranks of the people opposed to the Covid madness, looking for the unreasonable. Tone police the unreasonable and then reason will triumph!

Of course, the question is, unreasonable to whom? Politics is always a partisan business, so the central questions are who? and whom? Only unreasonable people think politics can be a right answer business. In most cases, there are many possible right answers, as right is determined by preference. In a democracy, right is determined by convincing the people wielding power behind the scenes that the mobs will be sated with one approach or another. All politics is partisan.

Mx. MacDonald thinks these knuckle-dragging anti-vaxxers are making her look bad to someone, so who is it? That is the key to understanding conservative perfidy and failure over the last half century. What matters most to them is the people in the managerial class and their place in it. It is very important to someone like Mx. MacDonald to never be associated with someone like Alex Jones, who thinks vaccines are making frogs gay and lowering the sperm count of American males.

What reason tells us is that defeating the forces of darkness that have launched the revolution from above is the only concern. If that means siding with people who line their clothes with aluminum foil, so be it. Nothing can come before the destruction of radicalisms in all its forms. This is what reason demands. Otherwise, if the radicals get their way, these people fetishizing their rationality will be keeping the rest of us company in the reeducation camps.

Politics is an ugly business under ideal conditions, because people inevitably assume that the other side of the fight is filled with bad people. After all, they have the wrong opinions and refuse to change them. That means things are said that are not true and not very nice about the other side, but that’s just the nature of it. This is something the people who never stop talking about their rationality should know by now. Reasonable people understand the reality of the human condition.

In the case of the Covid war, there are people making wild claims about the vaccine, mostly to get attention for themselves. That is an argument against social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. These platforms made it easy for stupid people to get on-line and have an opinion. This drew in the sorts of people who look to exploit the mob for their own benefit. This is also the argument against democracy, as laid out in Federalist Papers 10, but here we are anyway.

The thing is, Alex Jones claiming the vaccine will alter your DNA is no nuttier than much of what is in the mass media. In fact, a ridiculous claim is far less harmful than the plausible, but inaccurate claim. Few people will think the vaccine will turn you into Big Foot, but most people will believe we need to make kids wear masks. Far more people have been harmed by official lies than by goofballs on the internet. Again, this is something the “rational conservatives” should understand.

None of this is to say that there can never be criticism of allies or even a break with people who harm the cause. This has always been the problem with outsider politics, which tends to get overrun with weirdos. The issue is timing and intent. Privately chastising an ally for screwing up is reasonable. Dismissing wackos who are harming the cause is prudent. These are exceptions to partisanship that are required in politics, but conservative have made them their purpose.

This is why conservatives always lose. The main principle of the conservative is to conserve their reputation at all costs. No cause is ever so dear as to lead them to spend a penny of their reputation on it. Put another way, for the conservative, there is never anything worth fighting for, so they are always willing to cede the battle to the other side, no matter the cost. The Left sends thugs carrying bats and knives, while the Right sends out dandies dressed like interior decorators.

The test in these matters is this. Is the world better or worse with a small group of people who think vaccines alter your DNA? The obvious answer is the world is not affected in the least by people with crackpot ideas. Is the word made better or worse by allowing the evil of progressivism triumph? The answer is obvious. People fetishizing their rationality should be able to grasp this. Instead, for generations they have come to the opposite conclusion and lost every fight.

The Blood Feud

Posted on August 5, 2021 by thezman

A blood feud or blood rivalry is a long conflict between two closely situated groups of people, usually involving retaliatory killing. There is some event, real or imagined, then members of one group attack or kill members of the other group in retaliation for harms they suffered in that initial event. This leads to retaliation from the second group and we have a spiral of tit-for-tat. Until fairly recent in human history, the blood feud was quite common and often formalized in ritual and custom.

When people were more tribal, the blood feud worked to keep the peace. This seems counterintuitive, but the practice allowed for agreed upon compensation to the victim in the form of blood or money. The Wergild, in Germanic law, was the compensation paid by a person committing an offense to the injured party. If the victim was killed, then it was the value of his life. In other cultures, the concept of “blood money” was not uncommon, as a way to adjudicate disputes between clans.

This is something to keep in mind when looking at stories like this one. We have a 100-year-old man being charged with crimes that may or may not have happened at a place he worked over seventy years ago. He may have worked at the Sachsenhausen camp in the Second World War. According to the article, it is not all that clear what happened at that facility. His role in the running in the camp is also unclear. Yet, he is being ceremoniously charged with crimes at the age of 100.

This is not a new story. He is being charged because of the long running blood feud between Jews and Europeans over the events of the war. Jews believe they are victims that can never be compensated for the crimes against them perpetrated by the Europeans in the last century. It is not just Germans. They have claims against other European groups, even Americans, who saved them. The blood feud demands blood, even if it is the blood of an old man not long for this world.

These sort of witch hunts are uncivilized and antithetical to the traditions of the modern world, but they persist because Jews have tremendous amount of influence. Much of that influence, it is believed, rests on their victim status. That last part is mostly nonsense, but many people believe it. Anti-Semites think this is the magic key to Jewish influence, so they occupy most of their time trying to prove the Holocaust is fiction created out of whole cloth. Thus is the nature of blood feuds.

To be clear, no reasonable person can claim that Jews were not singled out by the Nazis for special treatment. The record is clear on that point. The Nazis also targeted other groups, like Gypsies and Slavs. There is no question that monstrous things happened in the war at the hands of the Germans and their allies. Much of it was the inevitable consequence of war, which is always a monstrous thing. When war is waged on the industrial scale, the results are horrific.

That should be the lesson of the two great industrial wars. The Great War was a blood feud scaled up and decorated with lofty rhetoric. At anytime, the sides could have accepted the futility of their blood feud and crafted a blood peace. Instead, they fought themselves to exhaustion. The Second World War and the horrors that flowed from it were the result of having learned nothing from the last war. Instead, the blood feud between the people of Europe continued and spread to the world.

The reason European societies evolved ways to mitigate the local blood feud or eliminate it entirely is they tended to spiral into mutual destruction. A blood peace was often stronger than one agreed upon out of convenience, for the simple reason both sides suffered real harm to achieve it. Two tribes that lost members over a feud that was eventually settled to the satisfaction of both, had a shared bond that transcended material concerns or present convenience.

Of course, individualizing crime and disputes was the way we eventually eliminated the blood feud entirely. Holding the individual accountable for his crimes and his crimes alone, regardless of the relationship between his group and that of the victim, settled the matter before it could spiral into a feud. When the Lord hangs the murderer, rather than forcing his people to pay the clan of the victim, it changes the relationship between man and tribe, as well the relationship between tribes.

In a way, the criminal code was a preemptive act. When the sovereign steps in to punish the guilty, he is short circuiting the natural tribal reaction. If the law is clear and the sovereign is even handed in his application of it, then the people not only accept his remedies but will seek his remedy before seeking their own justice. This is how the law is supposed to work in what we think of as civil society. At the heart of it is a sense of justice motivated by a desire to keep the peace.

What we see with the hunt for centenarians whose primary crime is of blood is a perversion of this principle. The reason to arrest this old man for crimes that may or may not have happened is to perpetuate a blood feud. There is no justice to be had in these cases, as the events happened so long ago. It is not as if there is a need for an example to discourage others. This is just a tribal cry for vengeance echoing through the corrupted halls of western justice.

Not to put too fine a point on it but look at the other example in the story. “A 96-year-old woman has also been accused of working as a Nazi, as a secretary to the commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland.” They are going to put on a trial a woman whose crime was having worked for the Nazis. In this case, the tribe crying out for blood is the Poles, who suffered more from the Nazis than any other group. Even so, much blood was spilled to reach a peace, the Poles should accept it.

In the end, this is the test of civilization. Civilized people understand that you must close the books on the past, in order to avoid reliving them. The present is always a story of the past, but it cannot be a nightmare from which we never awake. Disputes are settled and they become a part of the story of a people and that people’s relationship to other people, as part of the blood peace. When one or both sides cannot accept that blood peace, accept the blood of the other as a sacrifice, the result is more blood.

The Death Of Burke

Posted on August 3, 2021 by thezman

A key contribution of neoconservatives to the conservative movement launched by Bill Buckley in the middle of the last century was the assertion that conservatism is a means justifies the ends ideology. Unlike the Left, the Right will accept less than optimal outcomes as long as they are the result of a just process. Further, conservatives are not reactionaries, instinctively defending order. Instead, conservatism is the defense of liberal processes against the assaults of the illiberal Left.

One reason that these former members of the Left and the emerging new Right found agreement is they both agreed with Edmund Burke on key points. One was Burke’s description of revolution. The liberals who would go on to become neoconservatives did not see themselves as revolutionaries. Like their new conservative friends, they viewed themselves as defenders of liberal order and the liberal process that is contained in and constrained by tradition and institutions.

In his observations about revolutionary France, Burke noted that revolutions seek to cut themselves off from the past. The desire for an entirely new beginning must lead to a repudiation of the past. This divorce from the historical timeline means they have no sense of themselves and their place in history. This is the source of their inherent instability, and why they become murderous. For those who see themselves as defenders of liberal order, this is what makes revolution dangerous.

The other broad area of agreement between these former leftists and their new friends on the Right was on institutions. Burke’s great contribution to the Anglo-Right is his defense of institutions and traditions as constraints on power. Traditions give meaning to daily life, but they also play a key role in shaping the people. The voluntary associations like churches, clubs and so on maintain and nourish the social capital of the people and provide a balance to sovereign power.

Even today, you hear the legacy conservatives talk about Edmund Burke as their ideal conservative stateman. Yoram Hazony, the ultra-Zionist political theorist, named his think tank “The Edmund Burke Foundation”. Modern neoconservatives like Ben Shapiro love quoting Edmund Burke. It is one of the few things upon which traditionalist conservatives agreed with the former leftists. They saw Burke’s philosophy as the center of their understanding of conservatism in a liberal society.

The idea that conservatism is the defense of the existing processes has had a powerful impact on the arc of American society. By elevating process over ends, conservatism built into their defense of tradition and order vulnerabilities that the radicals have been able to exploit for generations. In other words, the very nature off conservatism as the bulwark against radicalism has as part of its design a set of contradictions that must always lead to its retreat in the face of the radical onslaught.

The first of those is the unequivocal defense of process over results. What this has meant, in practice, is the conservative defense of every radical gain. Once the Left can find a way to warp the process to support their ends, they turn their opponents into the most strident defenders of this new order. Abortion is the obvious example. Once the radicals changed the law through the courts, the conservatives agreed that it can only change again through the courts.

This has been the motivation for conservatives to get as many of their judges on the court as possible. The trouble is, in order to be a conservative judge, one must pledge to defend precedent and the traditional functioning of the courts. It is why every conservative judge nominated to the high court must sit in front of Congress and swear to never question the precedents used in support of Roe v Wade. It is why this current court will defend radicalism against all challenges.

The other vulnerability that the radicals have exploited for several generations is that the conservative fetish for means over ends prevents them from questioning the morality of radical goals. Since Marx, the central claim of radicalism is that they are trying to achieve a more virtuous and moral society. Because a just society is such a worthy goal, it justifies radical measures, including violence. Those who stand between now and the better world deserve what they get.

By focusing solely on the means in which political goals are achieved, the conservative must accept the morality of those ends if they are the result of the liberal process, which is the root of their political morality. This is why the “conservative case for…” is an internet meme. Since compromise is always the goal of Burkean conservatism, the first step is in figuring out jhow radical goals can fit into the conservative process. If trannies can be the result of the liberal order, trannies are conservative.

More important, this myopia means the Right can never question the morality of the Left’s stated goals. In fact, they are allergic to it. You see this with the reaction to the Critical Race Theory issue. Conservatives recoiled in horror when it was pointed out that CRT is explicitly antiwhite. The idea of addressing the morality of radical ends is anathema to the conservative mind. Instead, they had to frame it is bad process in pursuits of a worthy goal.

Edmund Burke wrote from the perspective of a man standing on the walls of an old social order looking out over Europe struggling to maintain order. His defense of the British social order was perfectly rational, especially in contrast to the horrors that were unleashed by the French Revolution. Like the social order he once defended, the Burkean conservatism is no longer relevant. The current order is inherently immoral and at odds with anything that a man of the Right should defend.

Further, Burkean conservatism prevents the actions required to overthrow this current order and institute a new moral order. If one is prevented from declaring the current state of things immoral and the goals of its champions as grossly immoral, then there is no way to fight the gathering darkness. If the preservation of the West and the people that make it possible must be sublimated to an abstract process, then conservatism can never conserve anything. It is part of the problem.

This is why the first order of attack for the dissident is conservatism. As long as people are willing to accept “well we have to respect the election results” as an excuse for not opposing evil, there is no escaping the gathering darkness. It is only when the opponents of radicalism commit to its utter destruction through any means necessary that the tides of war will change. That necessarily requires consigning Edmund Burke and his followers to the ash heap of history.

The Show Trials

Posted on August 2, 2021 by thezman

Note: The regular Taki post is up. This week it is another dive back into the Covid pool, with an eye to what is happening to the official narrative. Behind the green door is another world class episode of Sunday Thoughts, in addition to a review of Clarkson’s Farm and the detective series Bosch.

In authoritarian societies, the people have no real way of knowing what is happening inside the ruling class. The media is controlled by the regime, so they are not reporting on what is happening internally. Instead, they are broadcasting the official truth from the regime or elements within the regime. Often, regime elements have their own media platforms through which they speak to other regime elements. This is a form of signaling to avoid open confrontation between regime elements.

Otherwise, the public is left to guess about what is happening inside the regime, even when the policy is clear. During the Cold War, Kremlinologists would study what was happening in Russia to try and guess what was happening in the party. If someone stopped showing up to public events, a mountain of narratives would appear building on this one event. We see this with North Korea today. When one of his uncles is missing from the team photo, it is assumed he fell out of favor.

In America, this opacity is complicated by the grand delusion of liberal democracy, which blinds people from the reality of the political arrangements. The trappings of popular government add another layer to party rule. It often means that the signals coming from inside are warped by the pretensions of openness and transparency in party media. The need to pretend the system is working as advertised means that decrees must be dressed up as the result of consent.

With that in mind, the ongoing show trial for the January 6th protests gives an opportunity to do a little regime analysis. Nancy Pelosi has forced through a series of hearings about the protests, despite nothing new to reveal. The right-side of the party engineered their way out of the process. They knew it was a loser for them, so they are now on the sidelines commenting about it. The left side is forging ahead, with the first round wrapping up last week.

The term “show trial” has been with us since the 1920’s, but gained wide currency during Stalin’s purges in the 1930’s. By definition, a show trial is a public trial in which the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant. The point of the trial is to serve as a warning to political opponents of the regime, but also to serve as an expression of power by the dominant elements within the regime. It is all about violence capital within the ruling class.

From the outside, the show trial looks like a display of absolute power. After all, the condemned is usually required to confess to crimes that everyone, including his accusers, know he did not commit. The condemned is forced to humiliate himself as a way of showing his submission to power. Similarly, the people administrating the show trial must pretend to be enthusiastic believers in the proceeding. One element of the show trial is the manufactured appearance of unity.

In reality, show trials are an indication of conflict within the ruling regime, where the dominant camp feels the need to display their power. The point of it is to advertise the violence capital of the side holding the show trial. The reason Stalin had to kill so many old Bolsheviks was he needed to establish himself as the most violent member of the party, the one member willing to kill in order to maintain power. Stalin was making himself into the most dangerous man in a dangerous world.

The thing with Stalin’s purges and show trials is they were not just about his rise to one-man rule of the Soviet state. There were real policy disputes within the party in the 1920’s that are relevant today. The left side of the party, represented by Trotsky, was the accelerationist wing. They wanted rapid adoption of socialism. The right side was the incrementalistic wing, represented by Bukharin. They wanted socialism to evolve over time with party guidance and motivation.

Initially, Stalin sided with the right. In retrospect he chose this course because it gave him time to solidify his hold of the party organization. Stalin was not a theorist or a strategist, but he was an adept organizer. The slow and steady approach, while not living up to the ideals of Bolshevism, meant he could stock the growing bureaucracy with his people. By the late 1920’s when it was clear that the slow approach was far too slow, Stalin switched sides and embraced the accelerationist approach.

The party purges and show trials of the 1930’s coincided with what amounted to a genocide of the Russian peasants. Forced collectivization, execution squads and mass deportations wiped out close to half the agricultural output. Confiscation of crops resulted in widescale famine. It was all part of the revolution from the top in order to turn Russia into an industrial nation. in that regard, it worked. Manufacturing soared and whole cities were created to produce industrial goods.

The point here is the show trial is the bit of the iceberg we can see from outside the ruling regime. The part we don’t see is the party struggle over how to move forward with their stated agenda. In the age of Covid, which started with the chants of “build back better”, it is not unreasonable to see the current show trials in this light. The new rounds of Covid panic, which are a prelude to an autumn lockdown, suggest there is a power struggle inside the party as to how best to force the great reset,

The 18-month campaign against Covid has seen trillions shifted from the white middle-class to elements of the ruling class. The tech oligopoly has profited wildly from the massive changes in society in the name of Covid. Small business has been devastated, much in the same way the kulaks were crushed by Stalin. On the other hand, similar to Stalin’s revolution from above, the great reset is not going to plan. The purge of Trumpism did not end resistance to the party.

Another clue here is the slow maneuvering to pass what is being called an infrastructure plan but is in reality the end of the two-party charade. The $4T plan working its way through the Senate will lock in the gains made by the Left over the last year and foreclose any electoral resistance. The show trial appears to be an effort to whip up support on the left in order to force some elements of the right to sign onto what amounts to their own death certificate.

In our sissified age, the show trial is more about the show than the trial. In this case, men with guns were sent out to arrest the protestors and lock them away in dungeons around the capital. The party leaders lack the courage to bring these people in for a show trial, so they remain incommunicado. Instead of having them shot and air brushed from the history books, they are a silent voice in the proceeding, a reminder to the right side that behind the performance is a will to power.

This is why people should not be fooled by the collection of sissies they rolled out in the first phase. Sure, the those mall cops reading speeches provided to them by the party were ridiculous. One of them was barely literate. The typical mall Santa sees tougher action than these wimps saw on January 6th, but that was never the point of this highly orchestrated drama. Stalin’s show trials were not about public support. The public supported the victims. It was about party politics.

That is the other parallel worth considering. The victims of Stalin were on the side of policies that enjoyed broad public support. Stalin was easily able to overcome this by having control of the instruments of state power. This is why voting harder is not a path out of the current crisis. Your vote does not matter. Instead, what comes next is always what comes next when a ruling elite believes they are the embodiment of the revolutionary dream. The revolution from above will continue.

Sino-America

Posted on July 29, 2021 by thezman

Back in the early days of the internet, some people noticed that the emerging tech sector was helping the Chinese Communist Party use new technology to increase their hold on the people. Specifically, the American tech companies were working on two areas of technology. One was building the “great firewall of China” which prevented outside information from entering China. They were also building out what would became a digital extension of the surveillance state.

At the time, there were few people concerned about this washing back into the West, because after all, that is not who we were. There were people worried that American business was being changed culturally by with China. After all, if profit can cause people with liberal values to overlook slavery, torture and oppression, it means their allegiance to liberal values is up for bid as well. In other words, the concern was over doing business with monsters, not becoming monsters.

There were signs of the latter as far back as the Bush years. Thomas Friedman, the far-left activist at the New York Times was very fond of China. He started writing columns about how China’s one party rule was much more efficient than the sloppy and chaotic democracies of the West. Given that he was installed on an inner party platform, it suggested a change in how the managerial elite was thinking about themselves and their relationship to the people over whom they ruled.

Here we are a decade on and the American regime is slowly transforming itself into something like the Chinese regime. Deng Xiaoping famously said that China will have socialism with Chinese characteristics. Economically this has meant state capitalism where large state enterprises dominate the economy. They have some freedom to operate, but they must answer to the party. A vast thicket of private enterprise is tolerated, but the party keeps a watchful eye on them.

Whether by nature or by design, the managerial class of America is taking on Chinese socialism with American characteristics. Instead of state capitalism in the Marxist sense, it is state capitalism in the corporate sense. A small number of massive corporations dominate the economy. They allow the political parties some freedom, but politics must always serve corporate interests. Private enterprise is tolerated, but it operates in the shadow of the corporate giants.

It is on the political front where this is becoming more obvious. What the tech giants learned helping China build the surveillance state is the logic and spirit that it takes to operate it effectively. Gone unnoticed is the absence of whistle blowers from companies like Twitter and Google. One would expect regular document dumps revealing the internal workings of these firms. We have more defectors from North Korea than from Silicon Valley. The CCP has few defectors as well.

Of course, we are seeing the rollout of a social credit system like that implemented in China, except it is being done by corporations. Mastercard maintains a special blacklist of people who cannot use the credit card system. This was originally intended to combat criminal fraud, but it has now been turned to combat dissent. Note how it is becoming normalized. This is the trick they learned from China. That which is institutionalized quickly becomes part of the public psyche.

Another example of how the American regime is implementing Chinese authoritarianism with American characteristics is in how they are restricting speech. In China, the role of the party is explicit. The language is explicit. In America, the inner party is hidden and the delusion of self rule is their cloaking mechanism. Instead of hunting down violators of party orthodoxy, the regime is “combating misinformation” on-line. Note how this new term has been repeated by regime actors.

Ten years ago, most people accepted that there was a lot of nonsense on-line and people would often joke about it. That was the point of a free speech zone. Anyone could say what they liked. Today, the usual suspects are cowering in fear at misinformation on-line. Joe Biden claimed that people are being murdered by misinformation, suggesting they have anthropomorphized the concept. In America, misinformation is the deviationism of the ruling regime.

A good example of how politics has taken the second chair to state capitalism is the latest spending bill in Congress. The Senate just voted in favor of a bill that exists only in the realm of forms. It’s not words on a page, but rather a concept that has yet to be given any specifics. What is happening here is the corporate interest are telling the empty suits in Congress to get it passed and they will then supply the text of the bill when the times comes to make it official.

What this means is our clues for what the American regime will do next lies in what China is doing now. For example, the Chinese imposed a law on Hong Kong that allows them round of dissenters and send them off to slave camps in China. The first has been convicted under the new law. The American regime is trying to pass similar laws so they can do the same thing. That is the point of the current show trial being held in Washington. They want to justify new laws against dissent.

The hundreds of dissidents being held incommunicado by the regime are a good mile post when measuring just how far the regime has moved toward this Chinese style of authoritarian rule. It also shows how the media has been completely subverted by the security apparatus of the state. Within living memory the media would have been all over this story, painting the victims as heroes. Today, few in the media bother to notice them at all. When they do, it is to cheer the regime.

There is another lesson from China that applies here. When she tried to apply Marxist-Leninist ideology, it was a disaster. The main reason for that is political-economy is culture specific, so this foreign political-economy could never fit China. The political-economy of China is similarly a poor fit in the West, particularly America. In China, the iron rice bowl still control regime thinking. In America, the seething contempt for the masses prevents such a social contract.

Liberal democracy evolved as a solution to the violence that arose when elites were no longer willing to hold up their end of the bargain. It was a feedback mechanism to signal course changes and reform efforts within the ruling elite. What we think of as liberal government was always a solution to the problem of violent regime change that had been the mode in the West for millennia. The current regime is now back on the road that will inevitably lead to the gallows.

Understanding The Borg

Posted on July 28, 2021 by thezman

One of the more challenging things for dissidents to grasp about politics within a liberal democracy is emergent behavior. This is behavior of a group that does not depend on properties of individuals, but on the relationships within the group. Right-wing people tend to reject this in favor of reductionism. Individuals act out of material self-interest, so the actions of a group must be out of self-interest. This means the actions of all groups can be reduced down to individual motivations.

The fact that this form of analysis has never been useful in combating radicalism and irrationalism never seems to matter. There is something about the mind of right-wing people that prevents them from questioning this analysis. Perhaps it is simply the product of the rational mind. People who seek to live orderly lives naturally assume order is the default state of mind. To accept the existence of the hive mind is to question a fundamental understanding of existence.

Regardless, emergent behavior is a real thing and accepting it is key to understanding and predicting the behavior of the forces of darkness. The best example is a flock of birds darting among trees at dusk. There is no lead bird calling out commands to the rest of the birds. Instead, every bird is both a leader and follower, responding to the actions of the birds around it. When a bird on the edge of the group moves toward a bit of food, the rest respond in a cascade of corresponding action.

Another useful way of thinking about it, at least within the context of political behaviors within left-wing systems, is the synchronization of metronomes. Everyone has probably seen the demonstration where they take a group of metronomes operating at different rates and sit them together. In short order they are swinging at the same rate. There is a bit of math to it, but the demonstration is enough to make the point. While not emergent behavior, it is a good way to visualize it.

We have a real world example of it this week at the Olympics. This was supposed to be the Olympics where the glories of black girl magic broke through the toxic masculinity of white supremacist culture. Instead, Naomi Osaka was bounced by a nobody in the tennis competition. Then, Simone Biles led her team to a stunning second place finish in the first phase of the gymnastics competition. She topped it off by quitting on her team in the finals and they lost to the Russians.

Inside the hive, this was not expected. They had prepped their stories celebrating black girl magic and side pieces on diversity being the strength of the team. The jock sniffers were in the pumpkin patch waiting for the great pumpkin to arrive only to have reality turn up instead. Faced with disconfirmation, they did not throw down the paper straws from their soy lattes and question the power of black girl magic. Instead, they frantically scanned their hive looking for support in their belief.

Eventually, one of them came up with a way to fit this unexpected turn of events into the narrative of black girl magic. You see, Biles was not a petulant loser who quit on her team at the biggest moment. No, she is a hero for selflessly omitting herself from the competition so the team could carry on without her. Within minutes every sports reporter was blinking this signal to the other members of the hive. By the end of the day, this was the official narrative being told on every sports show.

The reductionist looks at this and assumes there must have been word from central command that instructed everyone to get on board with the new story. At the hollowed out volcano where the deep state operates, they had a meeting, and this new narrative was created and quickly e-mailed to all sports ninnies. It is an exaggeration, but that is how many on the right assume the media operates. They believe it is carefully choreographed performance operating along rational lines.

Instead, what is the norm, as in the case of the Olympics story, is something similar to what Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter observed in their study of the Seekers, a UFO cult in the 1950’s. Faced with the undeniable disconfirmatory evidence, individuals look to the rest for support in maintaining the belief. If there is strong enough social support, they find a way to rationalize the disconfirmation within the general framework of their beliefs.

This is the natural behavior of radical groups. They have strong social relationships within the group, because it is ultimately the point of the group. The members join as a form of self-abnegation. They swap their hated sense of self with the identity of the group, which is why they are fiercely loyal to the group. It is also why they treat criticism of the group as a physical attack. From their perspective, it is an attack on their person, because their person is fully integrated into the collective.

This is why left-wing groups are immune to reality. The fact-driven right-winger can spend his life presenting his evidence and the radicals will either ignore the disconfirmation or assimilate it into the ideology, like a snake digests its meal. There is no shot caller at the top directing it. The members are not conscious of it. Those silly sports reporters covering for the Simone Biles are not even aware of what they are doing, because they have lost all self-awareness.

This is why that left-wing person in your life acts different in isolation than they do when within their hive. Their on-line behavior, for example, is aggressive in defense of the hive, while in person they are often quite meek. On-line, they have the sense of being in the collective, so they act accordingly. In person, they are the soldier isolated from his unit, thinking of nothing but getting home. It is also why the radicals are the most intensely on-line. Social media has become their virtual hive.

The Journey Home

Posted on July 27, 2021 by thezman

Way back in the Reagan years, the people taking over the foreign policy establishment were often accused of being Trotskyites. The reason is many of them had been Trotskyites into the 1960’s and 1970’s. They were men of the far left until they were drawn into the neoconservative movement. Most were drawn into the movement through opposition to Stalinist communism. Some broke with the Left over the state of Israel, while others were concerned over the domestic issues.

The accusation was not without roots in reality. Trotsky was the leader of the left-Bolsheviks in the 1920’s. His faction opposed Stalin and Bukharin, who led what was known at the time as the right-Bolsheviks. Of course, Stalin’s faction won the dispute, driving the Trotskyites out of the party and eventually driving an ice ax through the head of Trotsky himself. Stalin’s later suspicion of Zionism would only add to this old dispute between the founding generations of the Left.

The Left-Right dynamic within radical politics is something that gets very little attention, because it does not serve ruling class interests. In 1920’s Russia, the Left side promoted radical reorganization of society, while the Right side wanted to take a gradualist approach. Critics of the conservative movement in America have relied on this comparison to chide them over their diffidence. The paleo criticism of Buckley conservatism was that it was just the slow version of Progressivism.

What this means is that the ruling dynamic of America since the middle of the last century has been a form of party rule. The communist had informal factions within a formal party structure, while the liberal democrats prefer formal factions within an informal party structure. The Democrats are the left-liberals while the Republicans are the right-liberals. They have the same goals, but disagree on the best approach for achieving those goals. They also serve the same interests.

Looked at in this light, the alliance of former radicals with the Buckley conservatives makes much more sense. It was not simply over opposition to the Soviet Union or even communism itself. It was a lesson learned from experience. The Trotskyites were slow to realize the danger of Stalin and it cost them their lives. The neocons were not going to make the same mistake twice. In other words, the shift from the Left to the Right within the ruling party was a continuation of an old struggle.

Within this framing, the recent break between the neocons and their former allies in the decaying Buckley coalition is a journey home, of sorts. Their alliance with the right-liberals, whose appeal was always to the heritage stock of America, was always about the old struggle. The crusades against Islam in order to secure Israel’s dominant position in the region was a natural consequence of winning the Cold War. Now that those battles are done, the Trotskyites are heading home.

This political Aliyah is why someone like Jonah Goldberg are pulling out all the stops to present himself as a grotesque antiwhite fanatic. He dresses it up in anti-Trump sentiment, but his rhetoric would be at home on MSNBC. Bill Kristol, of course, sounds like a socialist history teacher in the 1960’s now. His new venture, The Bulwark is underwritten by a Persian. One suspects that they secretly call him Cyrus and they think of him as freeing them from the right-wing captivity.

The most egregious of the crew, with regards to the bomb throwing at their old friends on the Right, is David French. His physiognomy suggests there are a few surprises in his 23andme, but putting that aside, he now sounds like an adjunct professor teaching critical race theory. It is as if he has been tasked with making it clear to all that the old Trotskyites are not only breaking with the Right, but they are ready to come home and take up their position on the Left.

Now, shape shifting in politics is nothing new. Bismarck was a famous shape-shifter, who would take any side to advance his overall agenda. He wanted to secure a united German empire and would partner with anyone to do it. Churchill is another example of someone who could change form quite easily. The great political operators of history were always men who adapted to their circumstances. They were implacable and tenacious, but always able to survive to fight another day.

For this quality to become a group attribute really is impressive. It suggests there is something preternatural at work. The fact that is seems to be working is an even more amazing phenomenon. The major left-liberal media organs are now welcoming these people home and adopting their foreign policy positions. Note how the Biden administration is growing more hawkish with Iran. Instead of embracing the old Obama approach, they are sticking with the Trump approach.

One cannot help but be impressed with the resiliency of these people. None of them are terribly bright. Jonah Goldberg is just a smarmy simpleton. David French could be legally insane. Bill Kristol is as dumb as a goldfish. Taken as a whole they look like a warning about the perils of inbreeding. Despite this, they are slowly transforming themselves back into that old shape and rejoining the left-liberals. It gives a whole new meaning to the term “drug resistant virus”.

Step back from it a bit further and it brings up an interesting parallel between the Bolshevism of the East and the liberal democracy of the West. Both became single party ideologies with an internal left-right dynamic. Despite destroying the Trotskyites in the 1920’s, Stalin embraced their agenda to secure power. We see the same thing in liberal democracy where “free market capitalism” supposedly won the day, but it is now fully animated by the people it allegedly defeated.

At an even higher level, the war between liberal democracy and communism that defined the late 20th century can now be seen as a macro version of the party politics in 1920’s Russia. The “right-side” defeated the “left-side” in the Cold War, but now the winners are embracing the policies they once criticized. It all suggest the last century or so of history is a drama played out on behalf of people operating in secret. The current crisis is just the final act in that drama.

The Partisan State

Posted on July 22, 2021 by thezman

It was Lenin who popularized the term partisan, as in someone who is party-minded or exclusively concerned with the interests of his political party. He coined the term to explain why socialists should abandon objective analysis of politics. In a society of antagonistic classes, the owners of property versus the laboring classes, class interests and material conditions of existence determine political outlook. Therefore, all claims to objectivity are delusional or self-serving.

We see this in the dynamics of American politics, but not in the way in which Marxists imagined the concept. The left side of the ruling elite imagines themselves as the vanguard of society. They are the ones leading social change in order to achieve their not always well-define ideals. As a practical matter, this means they are the champions and caretakers of the interests of minority groups or in the language of the moment, “the under-represented and historically excluded groups.”

The opponent is always cast as the face of established interests. After all, the power dynamic would not make a lot of sense if the opponents of the oppressed were powerless or inclusive. In partisan politics, it is always David versus Goliath, even when David is all powerful and Goliath is powerless. For most of the last half century, the American Left has had total control of the high ground in America, but they are sure they are the underdog and the Right controls everything.

What this means is that the power relationship is the keystone of the moral dynamic within partisan politics. The underdog, the oppressed, the excluded, must always be the moral superior. Otherwise, it is possible that the oppressed are being oppressed for good reasons or worse yet, the partisan is in fact the oppressor. We see this today where massive global corporations destroy the lives of ordinary citizens while simultaneously claiming this is being done in self-defense.

In Marxist theory, once the working class conquered the capital class, there would no longer be a need for politics. The workers would usher in a classless society. Without classes, there could be no class conflict and therefore no need for politics. In reality, the partisan needs an opponent to exist. The very definition of the partisan is rooted in the existence of the opponent. If one wanted to identify the inflection point of the Soviet Union, it would be when Brezhnev toasted Nixon.

In America, this problem has been solved by generating an organic opponent, custom made to play the role of oppressor, while never threatening the real power. In the middle of the last century, the American Left was in total control. The New Deal was confirmed by the fact that progressives conquered the economic depression at home and conquered fascism around the world. The best the Republican Party could do is promise to be just like the Democrats, which was pointless.

The birth of conservatism solved a massive problem. Buckley style conservatism began as a revolt against the war socialism that lingered on long after the war, but quickly became a usable opponent when debating the next great crusade, the long twilight struggle against the ancient opponent to the East. Conservatism was quickly packaged as the face of the oppressor, the tool of corporate interests. Soon, every Republican was pictured as the little guy from the Monopoly game.

Back then, the coalition of the oppressed championed by the Left reflected the demographics of the country. It was mostly white urban working class people and rural whites, with blacks as a silent partner. The silent partner grew less silent over time, but the demographics of the country grew darker as well. The original opponent was the white middle-class and has remained so. As the complexion of the coalition has grown darker, the nature of the opponent has grown whiter.

The trouble is the old Buckley conservatism discredited itself after the Cold War and no longer makes for a useful opponent. The system has been desperate to create a new enemy, but so far, they have only come up with cartoon villains. The persecution of the January 6th protestors is as much out of frustration as anything else. The Left is so angry that they cannot find real bad guys, they are taking it out on grandmothers who had the temerity to walk into the people’s house.

The ridiculousness of the new bogeymen does not mean the partisans have thrown in the towel on the project. There are efforts to create a new right-wing, which they have helpfully called the New Right. Members of the Old Right are looking for a reboot, so they are happy to join the project. The heirs of Trotsky are hard at work trying to sort this problem as well. They helped the Old Right avoid putting their ideas into practice for 70 years, so they are hoping to repeat this with the New Right.

Therein lies a critical part of the partisan society. It must always be partisans versus objectivist, with partisans having the power. The partisan puts his ideas into practice, while the objectivist is content to describe the world. The main reason for this is that as soon as the objectivist tries to act on his ideas, he is ruined. We see this in dissident politics, where you can analyze what is happening, but if you hint at any action, the C-suites of global capital are alive with ideas on how to crush you.

The thing is, the partisan state relies upon all parties believing that the struggle is real, not just theater. In America, this has meant that the upper-middle-class radicals must believe the enemy has real power and is willing to use it. On the other side, the perpetual losers must think they can win. Politics in the partisan state is a game of zebras versus lions. The zebras win most skirmishes, but in the end, the lions win the battle, and they only need to win once. The lions control every outcome.

The question is what happens when people stop believing this fantasy. Dissidents see the growing ranks of people who no longer see a point to conservatism or even conventional politics. In a world of rigged elections and grotesque levels of political corruption, voting is an insult. Something similar is happening on the Left, where the disaffected Bernie Bros are questioning the game. They already have a new party that is on the ballot in over twenty states.

The Soviet Union provides a little insight as to what happens when the struggle stops being real for the people. The 1920’s and 1930’s provided the Bolsheviks with enemies they could use to justify themselves. The war provided the ultimate enemy for the system, but then came the peace. The Khrushchev years were about making the dream of socialism real, but when that failed, the partisan state ceased to exist. Instead, it was a generation of oligarchic rule with the tattered trappings of socialism.

It can be argued that the détente with the West is the only thing that kept the Soviet Union from collapsing much earlier. The American empire needed the Soviet Empire, so it was happy to help the Soviets keep their system running. The American empire has no enemy to serve this role. The Chinese are too smart to be trapped into a new Cold War and the Russians are too weak. The instability we see is a partisan state that has run out of enemies and therefore, lost its moral authority.

The Final Boss

Posted on July 20, 2021 by thezman

One of the underappreciated qualities of liberal democracy is its ability to grow and develop its own opposition. In the Cold War this was not obvious as communism in the form of the Soviet Empire filled the role. Domestically, the inner party had the outer party as a fixed partner. Democrats controlled domestic policy, with some mild opposition from the Republicans. On the other hand, the Republicans controlled foreign policy with some mild dissent from the Democrats.

This partnership collapsed when the Soviet Union collapsed. A year after the voters overwhelmingly approved the appointment of former C.I.A. man George H. W. Bush as the successor to Ronald Reagan, the logic of having spooks run the country no longer made much sense. The system quickly pivoted to Saddam Hussein as a temporary fill in for the evil empire, but he was a poor replacement. In the next election the Cold War generation was replaced with the Woodstock generation.

The Clinton years were really just an interregnum. The system needed to learn how to create new enemies. We got the beginnings of the great Islamic enemy and an effort to recreate the holocaust in the Balkans. It was not until the son of the former C.I.A. man that we got the threat of international Islam as the new enemy. Fear of men on flying carpets carried the system into the Obama years. Toward the end of his second term, the search for a new enemy had started.

In this respect, the Trump election can be seen as a natural development. The system needed a bogey man and Trump was prepared to play the role. His appeal to the masses of Dirt People properly frightened the Cloud People and his reckless use of language made him easy to isolate and demonize. The new enemy of the regime would be white supremacist insurrectionists. That is the reason the regime compares January 6th to September 11th. It is their new origin story.

That is one way to look at what has been happening over the last 30 years. It is the quest for authenticity. This vast sprawling managerial state needs a reason to exist, so these manufactured crises provide it. Through the Cold War, the Berlin Wall was both a physical and temporal starting point for the regime. It is why presidents would go to the Brandenburg Gate and give speeches. The great twilight struggle against communism was the reason the regime existed and why it persisted.

The crusade against the Mohammedans was the first full attempt to recreate that old magic and provide the regime with legitimacy and authority. It is why 9/11 became a solemn holiday celebrated by both sides of the regime. Even though the left-liberals opposed the right-liberals in the prosecution of the crusade, they completely accepted the origin of it and the centrality of it. Note that the last anniversary of 9/11 came and went without much ceremony. It no longer matters.

On the other hand, we will now have two new holidays for this new crusade being used to authenticate the regime. Juneteenth will now be the new Independence Day and January 6th will be the Passover. The former is in commemoration of when the good news reached the last of the magic people. The latter is when the tides of history protected the faithful from the raging mobs of systemic racism. Perhaps this will be published as the Gospel of Saint Jaffa, a new holy book.

This new enemy the system has created for itself is more natural and compelling for the regime, so it will be more durable that the crusade against Islam. That drama raised questions about certain subjects that no one is allowed to discuss. It also had religious overtones, which invited in Christians. The only thing that makes the regime more uncomfortable than Christians openly talking about their religion is a collection of white guys noticing they are the only ones without an identity group.

The other compelling aspect of the new war on white people is that it has a historical and anthropological appeal to the regime. One side has been defined by its opposition to bad whites since Charles I. The other side has been similarly defined since Emperor Titus sacked Jerusalem. The new enemy of the regime both inspires and unites the regime in a new end times struggle to make manifest the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address.

What this suggests, of course, is that this jihad against white people we see raging everywhere is not going to go away quickly. All events will be warped to fit into the new world view of the struggle. Foreign adversaries will be cast as agents of white supremacy or enablers of white insurrectionists. Regime members who need to be purged will be painted as collaborators at their show trials. January 6th will be their Yom Kippur and every June 16th their Purim.

Whether or not this can work is a question no one dares ask. History has not been kind to regimes that are defined by their war with their own people. A multiracial regime at war with half the people on racial grounds is inherently unstable, as it creates both the means and the motivation to destroy the regime. If one half of the country is defined by its opposition to the regime and the other half is too dysfunctional and inept to defend the regime, the outcome is not hard to imagine.

History gives us a story arch for various forms of social organization. The old palace systems of the Bronze Age do not scale up. Empires all succumbed to internal contradictions and imbalance. Aristocratic systems eventually run out of able elites to maintain the system. Communism finally runs out of seed corn. It could be that the final phase of liberal democracy is a final war against itself. Born in sin and animated by a search for salvation, it sacrifices itself as its final act.

The Z Blog

Sports, Culture and Other Stuff

Category Archives: Badder Thoughts